Terry Jones watches an Edmonton Oil Kings game in the late 1960s from the Edmonton Gardens press box.File / Postmedia

I’ve travelled the world and the world of sports. But the best part of the 50 years has been Edmonton itself

In the fall of 1967, Don Smith, the managing editor of the Edmonton Journal, signed me up for $95 a week.

I floated out of his office. I was a teenaged kid from Lacombe and I had a job as a sportswriter on a major Canadian daily newspaper. I was about to live my dream. Other kids wanted to be sports stars, but from the time I was in Grade 7, I wanted to be a sports columnist. That was 50 years ago.

I wish I’d kept statistics.

How many columns? How many stories? How many sidebars? How many words?

How many air miles? How many land miles, by car, iron lung (Bill Hunter’s Oil Kings bus back then) and by train? (Yes, I took road trips by train with Clare Drake’s U of A Golden Bears and love travelling by train in Europe).

How many nights on the road? How many Bacardi & Cokes? And the stat I really wish I kept — How many national anthems stood for?

It’s crazy the way it worked out. How many sports columnists have a career story like mine?

I entered a ‘What Remembrance Day Means To Me’ essay contest when I was in Grade 7. Five hundred words — $10 first prize.

I was setting pins at the new bowling alley in Lacombe and was not very busy. So I took a bowling score sheet and one of those little golf card score pencils and attempted, for my own amazement and amusement, to get to 500 words.

I failed. I only made it to 449. I wasn’t real secure with what an adjective was at that point, but I tossed in 26 of the suckers and one-finger typed it when typing class broke up and entered the contest.

I won!

They printed it in the Lacombe Globe. By Terry Jones. My first byline.

I went to the Globe for the grip-and-grin $10 cheque presentation. Somehow, while I was there, I talked the Globe’s new publishers Tom and Bert Ford into hiring me at $4 a week to write kids sports results stories.

I turned that into a $5-per-paper weekly column in seven papers in Central Alberta on high school sports before I even managed to get to high school.

Then, in Grade 10, I foisted a high school football story off on the Red Deer Advocate and got hired at 10 cents a column inch and 10 cents a mile to travel around the area covering high school. That wasn’t bad when it came to the 10 cents per mile business because I was too young to have a driver’s license and got paid 10 cents a mile to hitch hike.

I turned that into a part-time/full-time job at the Red Deer Advocate. Three years later, I had the chance — while still a teenager and six credits short of a high school diploma — to join The Journal.

When I arrived in Edmonton in 1967, I was assigned to cover the Golden Bears, the Huskies, the Wildcats, the AJHL and baseball at Renfrew Park plus pretty much anything else that other writers didn’t want to cover. I wanted to cover everything.

That was back when Clare Drake coached both the hockey and the football Golden Bears to national titles the same year. My first flight was with the Wildcats to Vancouver for a playoff game. I remember Roy Phillion, president of the Wildcats, sat next to me on the plane. A nun sat two rows in front of us. He told me they put nuns on the flights over the mountains because of the turbulence.

Over the next few years, I had the Oil Kings, the WHA Oilers and the Eskimos as beats and travelled as well with Can-Am, Trans-Am and Continental Series auto racing as beats.

When I became columnist in 1976, I covered the Montreal Olympics and Canada Cup as two major assignments.

So there I was at the bar in the Lacombe Hotel on Dec. 23, 1976, when my dad waved me over to his table.

“Do you remember this fella?” he asked me of the man having a beer with him.

I confessed he sure looked familiar but I couldn’t come up with his name.

“Well, this is Bob Hill and he was the president of the Lacombe Legion and the man who presented you with the $10 cheque for winning the essay contest.”

I stood there and told Mr. Hill that if it hadn’t been for winning that essay contest, I might not be writing sports for a living.

He looked at my dad. My dad looked back at him and nodded.

“Well, son, I was just talking to your dad about that contest and he said he’d never told you.”

“Told me what, sir?”

“That you were the only entry.”

My whole career, I found out that day, was based on being the only entry in that contest.

Who ends up covering sports in the City of Champions & Championships and travels all over the world — to 50-some countries — covering people like Kurt Browning, Jamie Sale & David Pelletier, Pierre Leuders, Jenn Heil, Randy Ferbey, Kevin Martin and so many more and makes it to 50 years in the same town?

Trust me, I view myself as being the luckiest scribe whoever pounded a portable typewriter and filed by telegraph and went on to go through laptop computer keyboards at a record rate and tweeting up storms.

Who goes from being the only entry in an essay contest to a career covering Wayne Gretzky in the front end of his career to covering Connor McDavid toward the end?

Who covers a football team that wins five Grey Cups in a row to a hockey team that wins five Stanley Cups in seven seasons?

It amazes me now, the greats I’ve watched, the great moments in sport all over the world. But to top it off, there’s been all the history in the greatest town to be a sportswriter in Canada — Edmonton, Alberta.

Edmonton’s sports history basically became my history. Nine of the first 10 Grey Cups I covered, the Eskimos were in the game. I covered the last two dynasties in Canadian sports, the five-in-a-row Eskimos and the five-time Stanley Cup winning Oilers.

For about 30 of my 50 years in Edmonton, I had the best sports-writing job in the country. Ask other writers from my era. It’s true.

On my birthday in 1982, Sun founder Doug Creighton gave me my own sizeable travel budget to entice me to leave The Journal, and The Sun lived up to the deal for more than a quarter century.

I’ve travelled the world and the world of sports. But the best part of the 50 years has been Edmonton itself. This has been the best city to be a sports columnist in Canada not just because of the teams and the athletes but also because of the variety of major events to which it has played host. It not only has been the City of Champions, it’s been the City of Championships.

For most of my years, Edmonton has been the most newsy sports city in the nation. And the city has such passion and such a level of caring for its sports teams that it’s been like you have to be conversant in sports to have a place at the company water cooler.

As a result, every day has provided me with my daily fix. I’ve been doing this for 50 years, and I still can’t wait to go to attack my next column.

And to be able to spend 50 years of a career in one city, first with the Journal, then with the Sun and now as the sports columnist with both? Who does that happen to?

I’ve been beyond blessed. And the best part of it all is that this isn’t my retirement column. I get to continue getting up in the morning to pursue my daily fix and to compete in my event, the 800-word individual medley. I get to continue living the dream I’ve had since Grade 7 and corresponding with you, the most important person of all, the reader. Most of all I thank you, dear reader, for my memories.

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